There was my live journal, the website. It was dark, it was black. I used to use it on a CRT display, even before the thin ones came to town.
Some people, including that famous designer guy, asked me why black, why gray1 on black (it was almost white on black, but slightly darker). ‘It’s unreadable’ he said.
Fast forward twenty years and those OLED screens in everyone’s pockets and on their wrists too. Their dogs could have oled screens on their collars. My dog Nora had it, before she lost it.
And before I had to abandon her to the misery of the woman who brought her home.
Everyone. Bears. Displays. Ideal. For. Black. Background. These. Days. Everyone.
You won’t find any other smartphone or smart watch screen these days. Because they are fucking superior.
Yet, many of these folks, including web developers, have no option to make their fancy (not fancy, actually) personal websites black. I’m not even asking auto colouring them, respecting my own theme.
I just wonder, who those white theme lovers are. Who are they, really? The happy people that never ever had the urge to fucking scroll that fucking smartphone late at night?
Maybe I envy them. What are their lives?
Maybe they’re just cavemen. Yet, in my imagination, they’re the people I both envy and at the same time, I’m not longing to become one. I just want best of both worlds. I just want to genuinely being totally fine with white-only websites, because I genuinely never need and want to browse them when it’s dark.
Still, feels like an awful, awful idea. We just need to make dark theme an accessibility feature2 already3.
It must be gray, not white, because white is making high-contrast mode, not dark mode. For dark mode to be truly dark, it needs to be actually bleak. It’s readable okay if read in dark environment. You have to test dark theme in dark, not in a bright daylight. That’s the point.
A dark theme should avoid using saturated colors, as they don’t pass WCAG’s accessibility standard of at least 4.5:1 for body text against dark surfaces. ↩︎Which it is, of course. There are plenty of resources on dark themes. E.g. see Building a Material Dark Theme on Android. ↩︎
I just hate making these footnotes for this blog of mine. Yet, I’m risking to be misunderstood, and I believe the provided links would be of a help for everyone ever reaching this page. ↩︎